OTTAWA (WJC)–The Federal Court of Appeal has ordered the Canadian Government to revisit its decision to strip a suspected Nazi war criminal, the Ukrainian-born Helmut Oberlander, of his Canadian citizenship. In a 2-1 decision, the court told the Cabinet in Ottawa to reconsider the issue of whether Oberlander was a willing member of an SS mobile killing squad.
The 85-year-old retired real-estate developer from Ontario is alleged to have been a member of a Nazi death squad that executed thousands of civilians – mostly Jews – in German-occupied Ukraine during World War II. Oberlander has claimed that he was conscripted and that the penalty for desertion was execution. He has been fighting attempts to strip his citizenship and deport him since 1995. Oberlander says he never participated in any killings.
Wartime documents reveal that Oberlander was an ethnic German from the vicinity of Zaporizhia in Ukraine. He served in the Nazi Security Police and SD (the Security Service of the SS) from 1941 until at least 1944. His unit, Special Detachment 10a of Einsatzgruppe D, was composed of 100 to 120 men and responsible for annihilating all persons in its areas of operation who were considered “undesirable” by the Nazi regime, particularly Jews, Sinti and Roma. After immigrating to Canada with his wife Margaret in 1954 Oberlander became a Canadian citizen in 1960.
The president of the Canadian Jewish Congress (CJC), Mark J. Freiman, criticized the ruling by the Federal Court of Appeal, saying: “It is frustrating that two judges of the Court of Appeal have seen fit to delay yet again a case involving a member of an Einsatzgruppe that goes back almost 15 years, this time on a hyper-technical point of interpretation… The Court of Appeal has now decided to send this matter back to Cabinet for reconsideration based on its view that Cabinet was unreasonable in not assessing essentially this very same excuse under the rubric of ‘compulsion’, a concept that Mr. Oberlander himself did not see fit to raise in his own defense.”
Bernie Farber, chief executive of the Canadian Jewish Congress, said the ruling would bog down a process that had already taken far too long. “It is deplorable that they’ve come out with a decision that once again delays what should have happened more than 10 years ago,” he said.
*
Preceding provided by World Jewish Congress